During the roundtable discussion at LinuxCon this year, Linus Torvalds made some prettyharsh remarks about the current state of the Linux kernel, calling it "huge and bloated", and that there is no plan in sight to solve the problem. At the same time, he also explained that he is very happy with the current development process of the kernel, and that his job has become much easier.

Linux is more successful than Solaris, not because of the technology, because Linux sucks tech wise. Look at BTRFS, what is that? A ZFS wannabe. And then you have DTrace wannabees. etc. I saw a list of SUN tech that Linux had copied and it was huge. Things like NFS(?) and what not. Cant remember that huge list.

Ok, I'll bite.

I don't care about BTRFS, I want a reliable (as in "does not eat my data") and stable (as in "fsck will not eat my data") filesystem, like "ext3".

In the server space most people think like me. That's why nobody cares about ZFS but Solaris fanboys. In the real world, either RAID+LVM is (more than) good enough, or you have an EMC storage array that does all that for you.

I'm not saying that these technologies aren't nice. I'm saying that being good doesn't necessary mean having the technologies that geeks drool over. Solaris is a good OS, but Linux is also a good OS, and no less good than Solaris.

Windows has worse tech than Linux and Solaris, and Windows is more successful than both.

Windows is more successful than both because Microsoft uses its dominance on the desktop as leverage. People go the Microsoft route because it's familiar to them, and because, in many cases, they really have no choice.

Linux is more successful than Solaris because of Politics and that you can found a huge Linux company and be a USD billionaire. Look at RedHat. No one can found a Solaris company and become a billionare.

Building a company around a Linux distribution is no recipe for success. Red Hat is the only case where a company successfully based its business on a Linux distro, but they never became that big from it, and today most of their revenue probably comes from other services above the OS layer.

Companies are attracted to Linux because of three things:

1. It's free: they can take it and do stuff without caring about royalties (and on embedded systems, small royalties amount to lots of money when the unit volume is large);
2. Licensing: the GPL means they can contribute without fearing their competition will just pick those contributions and stick them in their own proprietary product:
3. Flexibility: like I said, the Linux development model allows contributors to try new stuff, and to modify existing stuff to better accomodate their needs. This does not mean bad code, and the examples of stuff rejected because of it are numerous (you can start with Reiser4, for example).

And contributions to the kernel are not done by individuals any more. Individuals are few, and most of them have some company backing them up indirectly.